I've had some problems with commercially-available embedded Linux distros, so I spent some time recently figuring out my own way of doing things. I've had a HOWTO posted for the curious for a while now. Latest addition-WiFi support.

Hopefully the subject says it all-my company has some device driver porting to do (x86 to XSCALE), and wants to farm it out. Rather than tie me up with it, we're looking to pay someone to do it for us.

So if you're local to the Austin TX area and think you're up for it, leave me a comment if you're interested. More details on my personal webpage for the curious.

Don't know if this happens to anyone else, but I find that there are a lot of movies that I have no interest in sitting through that I want to know more about the mythology/story behind. Examples-Thirteen Ghosts and Storm Of the Century, both on TV this weekend. I don't want to watch them, but I wanted to know what the machinery does once it gets its 13th ghost and who/what Andre Linoge is, respectively. So basically I wanted to know the story without having to see the story.

This one's been bothering me for a while, and I'm sure I'm not alone. I do a fair amount of software development as part of my job-at first it was just to support projects I was working on, but more and more I get the call when others need work done. I've even got "Software Developer" tacked on to my job description/title, but I still don't think of myself as one.

With SuSE 9.1 Personal not quite getting me where I want to be on my Presario R3000Z, I thought I'd give Gentoo a try again. The last time I'd tried Gentoo was when I was installing Linux on my new desktop at work, and the process was...painful. I ultimately ended up going with Slackware 9.0 and I've stuck with it to this day.

Well, as I posted a day or two ago, I pre-ordered a copy of SuSE 9.1 Personal beginning of April and it shipped out to me last Friday.

There's an interesting Globe and Mail article this morning on a new Linux distro some UWO students are putting together, Ignalum. Their business plan is (I think) to follow other consumer-friendly distros by making things easier and with tighter integration with Windows.

Just got the word today that the copy of SuSE 9.1 I ordered is on its way. I hope it works with the new machine-all I can think of when I use it is, "I bet KDE would fly on this!" :)

Even if it doesn't work, I'll get a nifty SuSE Live CD out of it. And I figure it's my way of contributing to Linux. Or Novell, depending on your point of view.

I got an email last week from somebody who was having troubles getting the SuSE 9.1 live CD to work with their eMachines Athlon machine. Specifically, it would freeze up on bootup if ACPI was enabled. I haven't got my SuSE 9.1 yet, but I thought I'd post here in case anyone's got any $.02 I can pass along.

He's tried most of the other major distros with the same results, so any help would be appreciated.

After the untimely death of my poor little neodymium, I lasted longer than I thought I would in getting a new machine. Which was, 2 days.

I bought a Compaq Presario R3000 and it just came in yesterday. Verrrry nice. :)

This past weekend my favourite little workhorse computer "neodymium" died. I bought him used a couple of years ago for $75; he was only a P166 with 32M of RAM and a 2GB HD but he was great with small Linux installs like Vector Linux. He was the first notebook I ever owned, and the one responsible for putting me firmly in the Notebooks From Now On camp.

I might need some custom PC/104 hardware development done on a project at work. Anyone out there that can make a recommendation or would care to submit a bid?

So I just went and did my civic duty and meta-moderated. All was well and good until I recognized one of the signatures in the message, in and of itself not much of a problem. Later, one of the postings had a signature with a link to the user's journal. What that meant was even though Slashdot wouldn't tell me who wrote the message, it was plain as day thanks to the link.

Anyway just something to think about if you want to maintain your annonymity.

Well, maybe new to me, anyway.

Over the last little while I've noticed two new ways to try to sneak spam under my radar. By "radar" I mean spam filters of course. Anyway, the first was kind of interesting and it all but had to be designed to beat Bayesian filtration. The entire message was a commentary on Stanley Kubrick's film-making career, and was a good page and some in length. Then, right at the very end of the message, a single sentence with the actual commercial message. It remind

I've decided against putting FreeBSD on my old laptop for the moment, primarily because it looks as though it wouldn't support my Backpack CD-RW drive through the parallel port. Oh, well, it would've been cool. Since then, I've installed Debian stable on it and it's working great. It's a little more functional than it was under VectorLinux, although at the price of being a little slower.